The power of small things

You know that feeling when you settle into a book and the world fades away? That’s what happened when I snuggled up with Chickadee, the fourth book in Louise Erdrich’s acclaimed Birchbark House series. I had read some of the earlier books but I worried that it had been too long since I spent time with this 19th-century Ojibwe family and their people. That was a wasted...

Marital mind games

Irene America, the protagonist of Louise Erdrich’s 13th novel, is a woman whose identity has never been entirely her own. For while she is both a mother and a serious academic, she is best known as the subject of her husband Gil’s esteemed art—large, assertive and overtly sexual portraits that exemplify his love, but also his constant need to subjugate and own her.This power...

A town connected by a painful past

Louise Erdrich's 13th mesmerizing and generations-spanning tale, A Plague of Doves, takes place in the small, now-dying town of Pluto, North Dakota - a town founded by whites in the late 1800s on the very edge of an Ojibwe Indian reservation, in the hope of profiting from the soon-to-be-built railroad line. There Evelina Harp, a young woman of mixed heritage, hears from her grandfather Mooshum...

Hearing a haunting drum beat

Louise Erdrich's masterful storytelling shines once again in her 11th novel, The Painted Drum, in which she weaves together three stories, all connected by the mystical power of a long-lost Ojibwe drum. In the opening story, the drum is found by Faye Travers, an estate appraiser in the small New Hampshire town where she lives with her mother Elsie, whose own mother was Ojibwe. Elsie tells Faye...

The sounds of silence

Fans of The Birchbark House have eagerly awaited the second installment in Louise Erdrich's cycle of novels about the young Ojibwe girl Omakayas and her life on Lake Superior. Those who read The Game of Silence will discover it has been worth the wait. On a summer day in 1849, six canoes arrive at Omakayas' village fleeing the Bwaanags the Dakota and Lakota people who had wiped out their...

Avenging the loss of sacred ground

A mesmerizing tale of revenge, retribution and forgiveness lies at the core of Louise Erdrich's latest work, Four Souls, in which she reprises characters from Love Medicine and The Beet Queen and returns to a cherished piece of land from Tracks. The story opens with the relentless trek of Fleur Pillager as she seeks revenge on John James Mauser, the man who tricked her into giving up the land...

Erdrich's tale of an immigrant's quest

<B>Erdrich's tale of an immigrant's quest</B> In beautiful early novels such as Love Medicine and Tracks, Louise Erdrich reckons with the Native-American strain in her own ancestry, interweaving ancient folklore and contemporary life. Now, in <B>The Master Butchers Singing Club</B>, Erdrich pays tribute to the other side of her bloodline. She tells us in the...

Childhood memories warm the heart

Quick! Pick the object from your childhood that embodied warmth, safety and untrammeled flights of imagination. For Louise Erdrich, whose many books have drawn on her Ojibwa background, that certain something was a bulky, blue-enamel woodstove labeled The Range Eternal. No mere inanimate appliance, the cast-iron box was the source of unending bounty: improvised soups to warm winter days, hot...